Fiennes’s encounter with Eliot is unique. Eliot is a work of four poems: Burnt Norton (1935), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942). As the poet Daljit Nagra suggests in the programme, each person must seek their own Eliot. One instance: the way Fiennes (director and actor) transposes Eliot’s verbal textual allusiveness into physicalised theatrical layerings – of Shakespeare soliloquies, of wartime broadcasts, of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (this last, the closest the production comes, for me, to a sense of transcendence, as the narrator figure recounts the movements his body mirrors while he watches a medieval rustic courtship dance). If I have a hesitation about the conceptualisation, this is still a brilliant – really brilliant – piece of work. Implicit visual allusions, perhaps, to the fact that Four Quartets was published, as war still raged, also setting off resonances with the darker aspects of our own world today. Tonal contrasts between dark and light are given spatial quality through architectural, chiaroscuro lighting by Tim Lutkin (both used together to coup-de-théâtre effect). An overall sense of sombreness is intensified by Hildegard Bechtler’s set of soaring, grey slabs slanted to open on to a changing-colour suffused cyclorama.
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